A thought-provoking piece has appeared in the Times right before a release of the Season 2 of the Very English Scandal series* by the BBC 1.

Usually I am not interested in the upper middle class brawls, mostly shown as intrinsic to those that happen in spider jars with sophisticated ornaments, but the Duchess of Argyll’s case makes me more sympathetic to her than to the others in her social group (although, I doubt she would recognise me as a fully equal human being, but that’s not the point). She was ostracised and humiliated so badly that even at the time her treatment in the court of public opinion was regarded as brutal.

She wasn’t a paragon of virtue, but, then again, that’s not the point: as a woman who presumably wasn’t afraid to reveal her love for sex more openly than it would be safe for her aristocratic reputation in the last decade of a puritanical era (oddly enough, the Swinging Sixties in their full bloom came just after the court case ended), she was named and shamed (or, as we call it now, slut-shamed) for being entirely promiscuous, a scandalous English Messaline etc., and the existing evidence of her infidelities (and first and foremost, those notorious polaroids) was a cease and desist letter that subsequently ruined her life.

Did her husband use the provocative photos as revenge porn against the Duchess? Absolutely: it is highly unlikely that the modern court of justice would take such things into account nowadays, which means that the justice system has indeed changed a lot. But even at the very peak of public shaming and stigmatisation the Duchess kept silence on a few important subjects—she had never revealed the identity of a man who was with her on those pictures, and she did everything she could in order to protect the reputation and well-being of her gay friends (“It was believed she had slept with 88 men, although many of these liaisons were dates with her coterie of gay admirers. Given that homosexuality was a crime in Britain, Margaret remained silent on the matter”).

She did what she wanted. She was in most parts honest about this and true to herself. And, of course, such a blatant intrusion into her private life was absolutely unacceptable and repulsively sexist: “In the final damning verdict, Lord Wheatley called her “a highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in what I can only describe as disgusting sexual activities to gratify a basic sexual appetite”.” Being a victim of this, she paid way too high price for enjoying life.

I am looking forward to watching the BBC episodes about her.

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*It’s called A Very British Scandal now.